“I promise not to go next to the house. I just want to walk around.”
I noticed Scott was beside me. He accompanied me as I took the most painful journey of my life. Opposite where the back door used to be, I stopped. I said, “You know what I’ll miss the most?”
“What?” Scott asked quietly.
“The first gift you gave me. I’ve saved it all these years. You bought it back from Japan that first October. You remember that silk rose? It was unique. They only make them like that over there. It was so beautiful. Now it’s gone.”
Scott said what needed to be said: “Be thankful we weren’t in there. We’re alive. That’s what counts. And you’ve got a place to stay.”
I glanced at him in the darkness of the now-cool night. “I know that’s true.” I sighed. “I don’t care about the expensive stuff. It’s the irreplaceable stuff. Pictures of us together on vacations, family stuff.” I was too tired and in too much shock to cry. “If it was arson …” I began.
Scott interrupted, “If it was arson, we’ll find the person and make them sorry.”
“If it was arson,” I said, “I know who it was. Dan Bluefield.”
In the car on the way to the city, I raged about Dan Bluefield. How Scott kept silent so long, I’ll never know. He didn’t tell me to shut up or to give it a rest. He let me fulminate all the way to where we exited Lake Shore Drive at LaSalle Street. I finally wound down as we left the Drive.
I sat in the penthouse library, surrounded on three sides by the floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The fourth wall consisted of windows looking north toward Lincoln Park. I didn’t turn on any of the lights, but stared out at the darkness. Scott’s building is the tallest around, so the view to the rest of the world is never obstructed.
He came into the room in jeans and socks. He touched my hand lightly. “Do you want to try to get some sleep?” he asked.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t be able to sleep anyway. I’ll just sit here. Maybe I’ll try to read something later.”
He patted my shoulder and said good night.
After he left, I walked to the window. For a long time I stared out, watching the cars move far below. Around five-thirty I tried to find something to read to blank out my mind. I placed a Jean Redpath CD into the machine, hoping her soft Scottish burr might help soothe me to sleep. Every time I thought I might be nodding off, the vision of the flames leaping out my bedroom window flashed through my mind. The words on the pages held no sense for me. I thought about the items I’d miss. The other gifts from Scott: a stuffed Eeyore from our first Christmas, a pewter Lord of the Rings chess set, the scroll of a love poem he’d written for our tenth anniversary, the dowdy throw pillow we brought in the South of France. The pillow had our names hand-embroidered, along with obscene comments in French about lovemaking between two men. Most of the stuff was not very expensive, just irreplaceable. I watched the light of the rising sun slowly spread over the city scape below.
It was Saturday, so there was no school. I wouldn’t have gone anyway.
At eight I found a diet soda in the refrigerator in the kitchen and then I looked in on Scott. He slept peacefully on his stomach. I gazed at his broad shoulders, uncovered by the blanket, then traced the line of his still-covered torso, down the sensuous curves of his thighs and hips, down his long muscular legs.
I let him sleep. I returned to the library, sipped the diet soda, and curled up with a volume of Wordsworth’s collected poems, guaranteed at any normal time to put me to sleep in less than five minutes. At some point Wordsworth must have worked his magic, because I came wide awake at the ringing of the phone. I glanced at the clock on the dark oak desk. It was just after nine-thirty. My head felt numb and my body ached from sleeping in the chair. I snatched the phone off the stand on the third ring.
It was Hank Daniels from the River’s Edge police. He offered condolences, then said, “I got in earlier, saw the report on the night log. I went out to the fire scene, just got back. It was arson. You need to come in so we can talk.”
As I was finishing my conversation, Scott walked in, dressed only in jockey shorts. “Who was it?” he asked after I hung up.
I told him. He looked at the clock. “Did you get any sleep?”
“About an hour.”
“You’re in no condition to go running around town. You need to get some rest, relax. It’s going to be hard enough to go back there and check for anything you can salvage, although I don’t guess there’ll be much.”
“Let me take a shower,” I said. “I’ll be ready to go. Somebody burned my home, and I’m going to make them pay.” I felt last night’s anger returning, only now it wasn’t fury, it was cold determination to find and punish the perpetrator.
Scott insisted we stop for breakfast first. We ate thick French toast at Nookies on Wells Street; then we went out to River’s Edge.
We stopped at the police station. With the trees in full color around it, the old place almost looked respectable. In the starkness of winter it would be revealed for what it was, a run-down rat trap. Daniels and Johnson met us at the front desk and took us to a gray interrogation room.
“Do you think this is connected to the murder?” Scott asked.
Daniels said, “Cops have an instinct that says never believe in coincidences. This is too much of one. We know you’ve been talking to people on the faculty about the murder. We want to know what you found out.”
For half an hour they barraged us with questions. I was too tired and angry to be reasonable. Often I felt my temper rise, especially when at one point they seemed to be implying that we might have set the fire ourselves, but Scott’s calm managed to remind me to take it easy.
Finally I said, “I’m the one who’s had his house burned down. You said it was arson. I’m the victim. I refuse to be treated as if I’m guilty. Let’s get my lawyer in here, and we can all have a nice chat.”
Daniels said, “We’re simply asking the standard questions we would in any arson investigation.”
I was only slightly mollified by that statement. I wished Frank Murphy was back from vacation.
Daniels continued, “What you’ve done since the murder, and we know you’ve been questioning people, may have angered somebody with a guilty secret. Whoever set the fire may have thought you were at home. Your truck, Mr. Mason, was in full view back by the barn.”
I used the old barn part-time as a garage. With so much harvesting equipment being used in the area, the farmer who owns the fields had asked me if he could store some of it in the barn. Fortunately the truck was far enough away from the house not to get caught in the conflagration of the night before.
“If it was Bluefield, he’d have only seen me driving that to school. He wouldn’t have known about the Porsche,” I said.
“Do you really think the kid did it?” Daniels asked.
“Yes, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the murder. I think the kid is fucking nuts, and he’d do anything to hurt me. That’s going to stop today.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Daniels warned.
Before I could retort Scott asked, “Do they know how it started?”
Daniels said, “Once they started looking this morning, it didn’t take long. Molotov cocktails through the windows, one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen. No other clues so far. With all the fire equipment around the place last night, they won’t find any footprints or tire tracks. You don’t have a lot of neighbors, but those few will be asked if they saw anything. I doubt if they did. With all the corn around your place still unharvested, it would have been difficult for anyone to see anything close to the house.”
Daniels added, “Two things you might be interested to know. First, we went to the Bluefield house to question the kid about the arson. Second, we don’t believe him about seeing you outside the principal’s office.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t misunderstand,” Johnson said, “you’re still our chief suspect.”
Scott’s hand on my arm forestalled a comment. He asked, “Did the kid have an alibi for last night?”
“He was at home, so he says, and his old man backs him up. Mr. Bluefield was quite self-righteous and self-satisfied about your home burning down. The kid didn’t say a lot. We questioned him about the murder again. The kid’s a jerk and would make a lousy witness.”
“That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of my innocence,” I said.
Sounding more reasonable than he had so far, Daniels said, “We’ve got to ask questions. It’s not a polite job, and you are a good suspect. People have been convicted based on only one of the things you’re accused of: last one to see victim alive, fights with victim the day he dies, finds the dead body, has blood on his shirt.”
I began to list the arguments against these reasons.
Daniels held up a hand. “Save it. You aren’t under arrest. Although you could be for obstructing justice. So far we haven’t gotten any complaints about your interference. Nobody willing to press charges or say anything nasty, which is lucky for you. If these people are talking, they seem to trust you. Learning all that information can be dangerous. So can fucking with the cops, so don’t try it. I’m not Frank Murphy, and his word only goes so far around here, so I’d be careful, if I were you.”
We said nothing to this, and a few minutes later they let us go.
We drove to my house. When Scott pulled up the driveway, the sight of the ruin by the light of day hit me hard. The investigation team was just about finished so I was allowed to prowl carefully through the ruins. The basement stairs had been destroyed. Little remained of the furniture. Globs of plastic were all that remained of the electronics room: computers, stereo, CD player. The place smelled as black and depressing as it looked.
Scott followed me silently. His calm presence got me through the inspection. I didn’t find one salvageable thing. I stood in the middle of the blackened ruin and felt all the helplessness and powerlessness of the night before back again and redoubled, but those feelings had a companion this morning, a towering fury. I’d get whoever did this.
We had dirt and soot all over our clothes, so we went to the barn to change. We’d brought spare clothes with us, because we knew we’d be stopping at the house. When I finished dressing and reopened the door to look out on the field of corn surrounding the ruin, I said, “We’re going to Bluefield’s.”
Scott said, “Fine.”
I turned back to look at him. “I thought you’d object,” I said.
“No,” he said.
Usually Scott’s the reasonable one in our relationship. The one who insists we stop, think, and consider all options. From ten years of knowing him I could tell that his “No” contained all the fury of someone ready to do battle. I mentioned earlier, he doesn’t lose his temper often, but when he does it’s spectacular. I didn’t envy Dan Bluefield his chances when we caught up with him.
We stopped at school. There is rarely a day or time that some group isn’t using the school during off hours. Everybody from the Cub Scouts to the Park District uses the complex for meetings or games. I needed to stop in the office to find Bluefield’s address. We found Carolyn sitting at Jones’s desk, and told her about the fire.
“This is too much,” she said. She looked us over. “You’re all right?”
We nodded.
“Could you save anything?”
I told her about our visit to the scene this morning.
“I’m sorry” was her response.
I asked carefully about the people we’d talked to so far. She gave no hint of knowing any of the secrets we’d uncovered. Jones had kept his promises to say nothing.
We left her at the principal’s office, trying to do that job as well as her own. They’d have one of the assistants as a temporary replacement, but even she would need to be trained.
In the outer office I picked up the phone.
“Who are you calling?” Scott asked.
“Meg. I’ve got an idea about finding out where all our suspects were last night.”
First I told Meg about the fire. She was instantly sympathetic and horrified, and then angry. She insisted we come over to her house. I assured her we were okay and told her we were going to question the Bluefields, but that we needed her help with something else. I barely got the suggestion started before she picked up on it.
“I’ll do all the calls. Leave it to me. I’ve got the old grapevine going. I haven’t been this involved in ages, but I’ll find out where all of them were. I wasn’t Gossip Central for years for nothing.”
“Don’t forget to be discreet,” I reminded her.
“You must be really tired,” she said, “to think that I need to be reminded about discretion. Trust me.”
I did trust her, so I shut up.
We got Bluefield’s address from my desk files, and drove over.
They lived in a modified Cape Cod on a cul-de-sac in the oldest part of River’s Edge. The neighborhood had been built before tract houses became the rage. They didn’t have sidewalks, but drainage ditches along both sides of the road. The large spaces between the houses were remnants of the area’s recent rural past. The home itself looked to have had several recent, expensive renovations.
We stormed up to the door, prepared to do battle. We knocked and pounded. Nobody answered. We walked around the house. No cars in the driveway. We peered through a small window into the garage. Empty. A dog in the house on the right barked at us as we walked back to the front. Standing on the lawn, we mulled over the possibilities: They had fled; we’d just missed them; they were hiding in the house. Since we were getting nowhere, I figured we might as well find out everything I could about the Bluefields.
A curtain moved in the house on the right, and a minute later a man emerged from inside. A large German shepherd accompanied him out the door. The house had two stories and was more than substantial. The man plodded through the leaves being dropped by the massive oaks throughout the neighborhood. He stood well over six foot six, with gray hair, and muscles still not gone to fat. He must have been in his mid-fifties.
He stopped when he got to us. Without a command that I could see, the dog immediately sat next to him on his left. “Looking for the Bluefields?” he asked.
We said yes. He stared at Scott. We got the recognition issue out of the way. Then the man said, “They took off together. The old man and the boy, about seven this morning. Mrs. Bluefield left about fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago.”
“Any idea where they went?” I asked.
“Nope. The boy in some kind of trouble again? I’d heard he’d reformed. Haven’t had any trouble with him myself for quite a while.”
“We just want to question him,” I said. “I’m his English teacher.”
“He still goes to school? I’m a little surprised at that. ’Course you’re not the first teacher, social worker, administrator, or cop to come over trying to talk to him. That family’s had a parade of folks through here over the years. Ask me, all the kid needs is a new set of parents and a swift kick in the rear.”
“You must know a lot,” Scott said.
He invited us into his home for coffee. We sat in the kitchen, a built-in microwave attesting to its modernity. He ground the coffee himself. The aroma was wonderful, and the coffee delicious. We talked baseball for a while before returning to the subject of the neighbors. The dog sat next to his master’s chair, head on paws, as if listening to our whole conversation.
The man told us he didn’t want us to think he was a busybody, but he’d been a neighbor of the Bluefields since he moved into the neighborhood five years ago. “Trouble. That’s the one word that sums them up the best. Father’s an unreconstructed hippie. Sells drugs out of the house, I’m sure.”
“Police know about that?” I asked.
“Hell, yes. They’ve come to get the dad a couple times. I think he served a few months in prison a couple years back.”
“How about
the mother?” Scott asked.
“The cops took her a few times. If the mister isn’t home, she takes care of the customers. I don’t think she’s ever actually been arrested, at least not while I’ve lived here.”
“You had any trouble with them?” I asked.
He laughed, then said, “Who hasn’t? Talk to everybody. They’ll have horror stories to tell. My time came about a month after I moved in here. One night my electricity failed. I figured it was a blackout, but I looked outside and everybody else’s lights were still on. I thought that was odd, so I went outside to check the circuit breakers in the garage. Out in the darkness I heard shouts of ‘Wimp,’ ‘Jerk,’ ‘Fool,’ other idiotic shit. I found a window broken in the side door of the garage. They’d gotten in and turned off all the circuits. I looked around, but whoever it was ran off. Next day I replaced the glass, vowing to be more vigilant, maybe look into a security system. Although one of the reasons I moved out here was to avoid that kind of thing. I was plenty pissed.”
He drained his coffee cup, refilled it, and offered us more. “Same damn thing happened the next night. I stuck my head out the back door, and the name-calling continued. I came back in and called the police.” He hunched himself closer to the table and smiled. “I enjoy this next part,” he said. “With all the lights out whoever it was couldn’t see me sneak out the front door. I’d heard the direction the shouts came from. I walked around the block and came up through the backyards. I wound up ten feet behind two kids. The cop car pulled up my driveway with the siren off, but with the lights flashing. The kids backed right up into me. I grabbed them both. One managed to squirm away. I held onto the other one. It was little Dan Bluefield, thirteen years old.”
“What did you do?” Scott asked.
“I’m an ex-cop. Worked the Twelfth District in Chicago, one of the toughest in the city. I yanked the shit out of the little bastard. I know a few tricks about hurting someone without leaving scars or bruises. Almost pulled the kid’s hair out by the roots. I had the boy in tears almost before I started. He cried and blubbered. I told him if anything ever happened to my home, I’d blame him and come looking for him. Never had any trouble since then.”
The Principal Cause of Death Page 11